Robinson Cano was in an unusual position as last night’s game at Yankee Stadium began, watching from a seat in the dugout rather than second base. Joe Girardi, whose touch with young players this season has epitomized the Hollies’ 1967 single, “King Midas in Reverse,” belatedly discovered his disciplinary powers on Sunday after Cano disdained to pursue a ball that had deflected off of Jason Giambi’s glove. Girardi showed the second baseman the bench, and there he remained as of the start of Monday’s game.

It can be argued that Girardi should have given Cano some kind of attitude-adjustment therapy far earlier in the season, not due to lack of hustle in the field but at bat, where the nouveau riche second baseman had literally hundreds of half-hearted at-bats in which he gave away outs as though they were free samples of his new cheese spread (Canoveeta?). Combine the results, which include the third-lowest on-base percentage (.294) in the American League, with what is now perceived to be a lack of enthusiasm, and you can expect that many observers will be ready to run Cano out of town on the proverbial rail. You will almost certainly start to hear the call-in shows receive brilliant suggestions along the lines of, “This winter the Yankees should trade Robinson Cano for a stud lefty pitcher along the lines of a mid-career Steve Carlton and sign free agent Orlando Hudson.”

No one will stop to mention that Babe Ruth was benched, too — multiple times — or that Mickey Mantle was pulled from the odd game earlier in his career. All-Star shortstop Garry Templeton, a player with a Cano-like approach at the plate, once had Whitey Herzog drag him out of a game by his ear after he flipped off the customers. These things happen sometimes, and they don’t necessarily indicate that there is an un-fixable problem with the player. Sometimes these players rededicate themselves and go on to fine careers. Others lack the intellectual or emotional depth to dedicate themselves to anything but the most basic level of exertion, and end up fading. There is no knowing which ending Cano’s career will have — nothing has happened, at least nothing that we know of, that would allow us to prejudge that. Judging basic performance is a whole other matter.

In some weird inversion of Mae West’s “When I’m good, I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better,” when Cano is very good he isn’t really all that good, and when he’s bad he’s terrible. Cano’s utter lack of interest in working the count or taking ball four, when combined with his streaky results, so-so power, and lack of speed, means that even at his best he makes a ton of outs and doesn’t get on base all that often compared to the average player. The results are still above average, especially when compared with your typical second baseman, but the results are also deceptive and prone to being overrated. When Cano slumps, he’s worse than a cup of hot hemlock for the offense. Compare him to a Yankee at the opposite extreme of the patience spectrum, Jason Giambi. Giambi might slump and bat .200 for a few weeks, but due to his walks he’ll still reach base in more than a third of his plate appearances, and one of those two hits in 10 that he gets will be a home run. When Cano slumps, as he has unfortunately shown for the whole season, he has no redeeming features at bat. With .238/.264/.327 rates with runners on base, Cano has killed more rallies than a Brezhnev-era Warsaw Pact tank crew on a Saturday night in downtown Prague. Though Cano will likely rebound from this season and hit .300 again, there will always be a hard ceiling on his offensive abilities.

Last season, what made Cano valuable in spite of that limitation is that he began to combine his hitting with very good defense. A player doesn’t have to hit like Albert Pujols to be a star; all he needs to do is produce at an above-average rate in his position at the plate and in the field. Those players don’t win major awards, but they are the solid underpinning for championship-level teams. Cano’s obvious complacency on Sunday finally seems to have awoken Girardi to the reality that for much of this year Cano has been doing neither.

There is a subject here for further research, which is an inquiry into whether players of Cano’s style peak early and fail to recover. One suspects that the answer is yes: A player with a broad base of skills seems more likely to survive the problems of age and injury than one who has just one prop to support him. Lose that prop and there’s nothing to support him. Whatever Cano’s true future, his value right now is low, the possibility for some kind of rebound high, the alternatives few, and they’ll actually have more difficult problems to deal with this offseason. The best plan is to forgive, at least for now, and wait.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.